She checked one of her two watches—the less intimidating one with hands that swept the seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, as opposed to the countdown digits of the other. She could hear the squeaky wheels of his cart, the wiry bang of things going into it. He walked right by where she squatted, hiding, deciding whether to spring out or not, until it was too late; he’d already passed. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes without his wondering where she was. Then fifteen. Finally, she conceded the game he—apparently—hadn’t known they were playing. Or maybe he just didn’t care. Lifting her mask, she called out to her oblivious fellow shopper:
“You still perfect over there?” she asked.
“As ever,” Marcus said, surprising her by popping up from behind, smiling, or so she assumed, what with the gas mask and all. “And you?”
Lucy rose as she lowered her mask, sidestepping out from behind the counter. “Need you ask?” she said, doing a twirl right there in the middle of the aisle.
“That reminds me,” she called out, still thinking about the condoms. “We need more drugs.”
“Need? Or want?”
Regarding pharmaceuticals, Lucy displayed a hypochondriacal Boy Scout’s desire to be prepared for anything. Every drugstore or grocery store with a pharmacy in back, she stocked up on cold medicines, bandages, antibiotics, sleeping pills, cortisone, painkillers, prenatal vitamins (which she slipped into a pocket while Marcus wasn’t looking), and pretty much everything else she could think of with the exception of birth control pills. Marcus, meanwhile, stuck with iodine, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Aspercreme, and bottles of Absorbine Jr.
“You should get some antibiotics too,” Lucy said. “I mean, you can use mine, but you can never have enough, considering all the rusty edges out there.”
Marcus shook his head. “I know exactly how much is enough,” he said.
“Elucidate me.”
“Any,” Marcus said. “For me, at least.” Turned out he’d had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic he’d been given when he was five. He couldn’t remember the name. One of the ones that ended in “-in,” he offered.
“I think that’s all of them,” Lucy said. “Or just about.”
“That’s been my general impression,” he said, “yes.” To hear him tell it, that singular dose of an antibiotic ending in “-in” had been enough to almost end Marcus. “My throat swelled shut,” he said. “A doctor talked my dad through doing a tracheotomy over his cell phone. There wasn’t even time for an ambulance.” He pointed toward a knot of scar tissue just under his Adam’s apple, just above the collarbone. Lucy touched it as cautiously as Adam reaching out toward God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
“Did it hurt?”
“I was unconscious by then,” Marcus said. “I just remember popping out of it once I could breathe again—like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. My parents said it was like I’d come back from the dead.”
“Sounds like you kind of did,” Lucy said.
“Guess the universe just had other plans for me,” he said, Lucy noting how he used “universe” to avoid invoking the a- or g-words.
“Looks like,” she agreed, not making the mistake of mentioning her own plans for him or his DNA. Not again, at least.
24
Earthly remains and a gluttonous rat dog weren’t the only things Dev needed to get rid of. Along with the rest of civilization, the end of the world also saw the end of routine trash pickup. Diablo and he had produced enough on their own, each day’s meals adding more bones, eggshells, bottles, and cans to the steadily growing pile to be dealt with, eventually. But once he started taking care of Devonshire’s other citizens, garbage production kicked up a few notches. Not only that, but he’d inherited all the rotting food in his dead neighbors’ refrigerators.
He’d tried leaving those upright grocery coffins alone, counting on their hermetic seals to keep the stench contained. But the other citizens of Devonshire—those with a keener sense of smell—were less inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. They either steered clear of the aforementioned appliances or worried away at them, claws raking through enamel, leaving exposed metal and flakes of eggshell, harvest gold, olive green littering the linoleum. Eventually, one intrepid shepherd got the thing open and proceeded to sicken itself on the contents before puking them up again all over the place.
Crap, Dev thought after stepping through the door, just before stepping back out again. And then he went looking for his respirator—the one he thought he’d retired.
Plastic shopping bags stuffed with more shopping bags: every house he entered had stashes of them. Armed with these, a pair of rubber gloves, and the aforementioned respirator, Dev worked through the sarcophagi of his neighbors’ refrigerators, segregating the garbage that dripped from the containers whose lids had been glued tight with dried mayo, ketchup, or the aptly named jam. These latter were bagged and deposited in the charred trucks making up the Great Wall of Devonshire. Some were used to fill in the empty spaces left behind in the cabs when their passengers went to pieces, while the rest were deposited into the truck beds to top off the crenellations formed by the sequence of cab, bed, cab . . .
The drippy-stinky stuff Dev wrapped in newspaper before bagging it. He had plenty of those too—newspapers—including one particular edition he’d been wondering what to do with. After getting home on the afternoon of the whatever-it-was, he found a still-bound bundle of the Detroit Free Press, the last edition of the last day before there was no more history to be the first draft of. Even though the papers were dropped off by truck early in the morning, the delivery kid always waited until getting back from school. None of the working-class subscribers complained about this deferred delivery schedule; like the paper kid, they were too busy establishing a.m. consciousness to be bothered with news of the world (or even just that of the greater Detroit metro area). Plus, those who were really eager to be depressed just checked their Facebook feeds to catch up on the latest dead celebrity or political travesty their once-sane friends were ranting about. The only reason any of them still subscribed to the paper paper—other than out of pure habit—was for the want ads, sale inserts, and coupons.
That bundle of pristine copies of the doomsday edition would have made a good collector’s item, if there were anyone left to collect it. Dev himself—out of respect or superstition—had set it aside, away from the rain, to wait until he figured out what to do with it. Reading at least one copy might have seemed like a no-brainer, but based on what he could see of the front page above the fold, he decided to skip it. At first, everything was still too raw. And then there was too much to do. Finally, when Dev was ready, the old adage proved true: old news was no news. Nothing he’d read in that last edition could possibly hold his interest for the simple reason that he knew exactly how each and every one of the stories contained therein turned out:
“. . . and then everybody died.”
Dev technically didn’t need to wrap the garbage in the first place, especially before placing it in a plastic bag. He’d started because that’s what his mother had always done. When his mother was still alive to ask, she’d said it was because that’s how her mother always did it. When Dev asked why, his mother called her sister, who called an aunt, who discovered that Dev’s maternal grandmother—the originator of this multigenerational routine—did it because the garbage pail they used had rusted through in spots and she didn’t want to attract rats, which were a big enough problem in that part of Bombay (now Mumbai). And so three generations of headlines and want ads had been used to swaddle Pranesh, then Brinkman, garbage because a rusty pail in India leaked a hundred years ago. And even though he’d eventually gotten to the root of the practice, it didn’t stop him; the habit had already been set.
In a way, it seemed fitting: wrapping old food in old news for old reasons. Dev did set aside one copy—out of respect or superstition or maybe to show the aliens once they arrived, so they could see what humans were interested in just before go
ing extinct. The rest of the copies, however, were dedicated to garbage wrapping. And when he ran out, he started using the other papers his neighbors had left behind. What was left after that could be used for toilet paper, once he ran out of the real kind, which, thanks to his neighbors’ tendency to buy such things in bulk, shouldn’t be for a very long time.
The plastic bags full of gift-wrapped garbage would not be added to the wall. Despite the plastic and paper, gulls, crows, and other scavengers would eventually find them, rip them open, and cry or caw or chitter their delight over what they found. And Dev wasn’t having it. In addition to the inconvenience such animals posed, there was the chance their presence in numbers might attract larger animals of the Dev-eating kind.
Which left him with a problem: Now that he had all this neatly packaged garbage, what was he supposed to do with it? That it needed to be somewhere on the other side of the wall was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was how he was going to get it far enough outside the wall so that it wouldn’t act as bait for things he didn’t want to attract. Dev was never that good at sports; given a baseball, he was as likely to space out over the red stitching x-ing itself in a kind of Möbius strip around the ball as throw it with much strength, speed, or aim. So just throwing the bags over the wall wouldn’t do it. And the idea of loading up a car and driving to a dump site on a regular basis for the rest of his life seriously conflicted with his decision to stay put.
Burning was an option, but Dev got hung up on the whole respect versus superstition thing. It didn’t seem right to treat the garbage like corpses or vice versa. Plus, Dev wasn’t sure he’d burn the bodies now, if he had it to do over again. He’d just gotten lucky all that smoke hadn’t drawn others—if there were any to draw in the first place—an unknown Dev preferred not be resolved by having them show up on his doorstep.
He’d begun imagining the construction of a kind of garbage catapult using bungee cords zip-tied into a bungee cable and attached somehow to a long-handled, big-bladed shovel when he noticed the half-hushed giggle of a far simpler solution: the river. The one flowing past at the end of his abbreviated block. All he’d have to do is lean over the railing, drop, and let the current carry it out of sight and out of Devonshire. He hesitated at the thought of polluting the already-polluted river, which he had plans for, once nature, no other people, and time cleaned up its act. But then he rationalized it. He wasn’t some factory, pouring who knew what into the river. He wasn’t the local sewer system, diverting its overflow there either. He was just dropping neatly buoyant bubbles of organic material on top of a moving medium that would carry it away without necessarily interacting with it. At some point, something hungry or curious would fish them out, or the tumbling current would work the knots free, as the organic stuff sank and dissolved to become fish food while the plastic bags, unknotted and unburdened, could go flying to wherever the wind wanted them . . .
Once again, out of sight, out of Devonshire.
25
As they drove, passing billboards advertising memories, a game suggested itself: What Do You Miss? This was not to be confused with Whom Do You Miss? They never played that game; it hurt too much. What was as far as they could let themselves go. Rounds were started randomly, when one of them announced some missed thing, like:
“Ice cream,” Lucy said, beginning a round. It was a no-brainer but personally a little risky, seeing as it reminded her of her mom, a very big whom she missed desperately.
“Twinkies,” Marcus countered, inspired by Lucy’s ice cream, which itself, he assumed, was probably inspired by the truck they were driving.
Lucy was about to leapfrog to the name of a K-pop boy band that specialized in a discordantly peppy goth-jazz-steampunk fusion she liked but was also talking herself out of mentioning because, well, in her experience one of the few universal things boys her age didn’t care about was boy bands of any ilk, followed by Twilight as a close second. But then she stopped. “Twinkies?” she said.
Marcus nodded behind the wheel.
“There still are Twinkies,” she pointed out. “They literally did survive the apocalypse—despite Zombieland-ish suggestions to the contrary.”
“Almost didn’t,” Marcus pointed out. “Hostess went bankrupt, but then the brand got bought and brought back.”
“My point being,” Lucy clarified, “we’ve seen boxes of them all over the place. You know that ‘best by’ date is a bunch of hooey, right?”
Actually, he hadn’t known that, but that wasn’t the reason. “I gave them up,” Marcus said. “Just before.” Which was only technically true. The earthquake at the 7-Eleven and the bloodied Twinkies had only temporarily put him off the golden cake, though at the time his abstention was expected to be permanent—given other things he’d decided to give up at the time. But after what happened—and didn’t happen—he decided that giving up Twinkies was the least he could do, as punishment and a reminder of how easily he’d been led astray. None of which he was ready to confess to Lucy, not having stipulated a timeline on that promise to himself to come clean on the whole terrorism thing. It wasn’t something you led with—he decided—when starting a new relationship, especially considering the limited number of still-breathing options he’d come across in that regard. And so when she asked him why, he lied. “Watching my weight,” he said, which was just close enough to the bone for Lucy to switch topics away from food altogether.
“New episodes of The Walking Dead,” she said for her next missed thing.
Marcus gave her a thumbs-up, impressed with a girl who didn’t feign being put off by all the gore. But just in case, “Don’t tell me it’s ‘because of the characters,’” he said.
“Nope,” Lucy said. “Blood-n-guts, straight up.”
Marcus let go of the wheel briefly to give her two thumbs-ups.
“Now you,” Lucy said. “Your turn.”
Marcus thought, hesitated, then said it: “Believing.”
“In . . . ?” Lucy prompted.
Marcus leaned back to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror and then went back to staring straight ahead, at the road where they were the only thing going or coming anywhere. “You know,” he said.
And she did. Though her former kind and his former kind differed on the particulars, neither had doubted that there was some bigger personal intelligence in charge of things; whether you called it God or Allah or your higher power as you understand it, it came down to the same thing, emotionally: an invisible friend who had your back and cared what happened to you. Instead of what the world they were driving through now was: indifferent.
“Domino’s Pizza,” Marcus said to break the gloom that had settled over the two of them.
“I thought you were watching your weight,” Lucy said, eager to get off the food thing Marcus had brought them back to.
“Am,” Marcus lied. “But Domino’s is safe.”
“How so?”
“They don’t deliver anymore.”
Lucy mimed a rim shot, and Marcus said, “Basketball.”
“Watching or playing?”
“Both.”
“Hanging out online,” Lucy said.
Marcus made a face, aiming it into the rearview so she could see instead of having to guess from his profile.
“What’s wrong with hanging out online?”
“What’s wrong with hanging out in real space instead of cyberspace?” Marcus countered. He’d come to view the easy anonymity of the latter with a belated but healthy dose of skepticism.
“Nothing,” Lucy said. “It’s just, you know, convenient.” She didn’t mention that when it came to meeting others with her interests, staying local had resulted in basically one: Max. But in cyberspace you could connect to like-minded people you’d never bump into IRL. She had no way of knowing that those were the same reasons Marcus had for despising the web’s so-called convenience.
“Some people take advantage of that convenience” was all he wanted to say on the subject.
L
ucy paused, then got it, or thought she did. Said, “You landed yourself a catfish, didn’t you?”
“Catfish?”
“Like some fifty-year-old creep passing himself off as a sixteen-year-old cheerleader with big boobs.” She paused. “I think the name has something to do with being reeled in or bottom-feeders. Probably both.”
Marcus considered the excuse she’d given him for discussing what he’d been through without really discussing what he’d been through—and took it. “Kind of,” he said, eyes tentative in the rearview.
“That sucks,” she said, returning his reflected gaze. “Was it, like, some total perv? Did he get you to, like, show up at some motel room and then go all pervy on you?”
“No,” Marcus said, too hastily. “I mean, they took advantage of me in different ways.”
“‘They,’” Lucy repeated, catching it immediately. The I-don’t-want-you-to-know-the-sex-of-the-person-I’m-talking-about pronoun. “Is this a he they or a she they?”
“A she they,” Marcus said. “She got me to,” he hesitated, then came up with a euphemism he figured he could work with, “send her money.”
“How much money?”
“Almost everything I had,” Marcus said, not untruthfully.
“How’d she get you to do that?”
“She played on my sympathies,” he said, also not untrue. “There were all these things she wanted me to help fix.”
“Like . . . ?”
“Broken car,” Marcus said. “Broken tooth. Stuff kept breaking on her. I told her she must be the unluckiest person I knew—except I didn’t really know her. Every time I started getting suspicious, she’d send me a picture to hook me all over again,” he said, thinking of the slide shows they’d used against him.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 18